


The Sun Room

by kvikindi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cold War, Espionage, Gen, S.H.I.E.L.D.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 02:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2370350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter and Howard Stark versus the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sun Room

Stark had a sickle-shaped scar from Los Alamos, at the base of his palm, just above the wrist. Peggy knew it was from Los Alamos because she had not seen it before then. It came as a surprise to her to think that she had seen so much of Stark in that year, 1945, that she could say with certainty, "He went, and he came back a little changed." She was not used to this sort of certainty, to being able to map effects and their causes. She thought that the first person with whom she'd shared it was Steve— not in the war, of course, but in New Jersey, when he was small and malleable still. They had not touched then, she and Steve. They had barely known each other's names, yet at the same time they were intimate in this one aspect: that if one was wounded, the other would see. It made a surprising difference, more than she might have expected. To see, to be aware of someone else's body. To know that if you yourself changed, someone would notice; that the you you had been would not die in the vanishing.

So then: this scar, perhaps from the lab. He was not overly careful with his instruments, Stark; not careful as a person, she would say. And she did not know what New Mexico was like, had an idea that it was overrun by gunslingers. She imagined Spanish churches and cattle shuffling in the dust, ghost towns and red mesas. She knew why Howard had wanted to go, quite aside from the weapons. She could not think of anything more different from the white shores of Greenland. God, Greenland, what a bleak place. Or even their own digs in London, grayed out by smoke, with the noise of rebuilding all around. Give him someplace eternal, she supposed, or enough like it that he could forget. Just for a little. Just for a change.

And she was in New York, when he got back, in August of that year. "Howard," she wanted to say, "what have you done?" She knew that look of disaster. But she couldn't ask, and he couldn't tell her. She had dreams in which he'd buried something out in the desert, and when she dug it up, she found it was Steve: perfect, as she'd lost him, what did the church say? —Incorrupt.

Sometimes when she dug it up, it was a mechanical heart. It glowed in her hand like the aurora in the Arctic. Sometimes the desert was full of holes, as though she had been digging for a long time. Was she digging, or planting? "In the other world, we shall reap as we sow now." What grows in the desert? she thought. Citrus trees, and bones. The dead.

Soon she knew, or thought she knew, but did not stop dreaming. They could not talk about it. She saw less of him.

* * *

Then the next year: driving out to Long Island. Being driven, that is; Stark, of course, had a driver. Through vast hedges, hills, she could glimpse the sea. It was lovely, she thought. She couldn't help it. It had been designed to be lovely. A perfect pleasure-spot. She supposed Stark had been raised here. It explained a great deal: his obsession with objects designed for escape, the joy that he took in breaking things. She herself did not understand this urge. She'd so often been tasked with sweeping up— a woman doing a woman's work— that the breakage had come to seem counterproductive.

He greeted her at the door with sunglasses on. It was noon, and he was holding a drink: something in a cocktail glass, faintly peach-colored. He looked younger than she remembered. He said, "Agent Peggy!"

"I wasn't aware I'd surrendered my surname."

"Well, you have entered my territorial domain." He peered at her over the sunglasses. "Law of the land. Rules of old-friendship. Rules of the house."

"I see," she said. " _Are_ we old friends?" She might not have described them such. There was something about Howard that did not fit easily into the ordinary rubric of "friend." And she, since the war, was slower to trust, slower to embrace.

But she saw she'd hurt him— which was absurd, of course, that he could be as thin-skinned as all that, a man like Howard, and she was taken aback. But then— as they walked through the house, she saw that it was abandoned. Empty, and not only in a spiritual sense. Room after room had been stripped of possessions. Faint indentations in the carpets showed where tables and chairs had once been, but even the walls had been stripped of their paper. It was as if no one lived there, or had ever lived there. She touched a bare wall.

"Howard," she said, "what have you done?"

"I'm redesigning the house. It's going to be modern. Very modern. I thought about rebuilding it, but in the end, why bother? Walls are walls. Anyway, don't worry about that." He pushed open a set of veranda doors, and they were outside again: in a courtyard that had walls like a cloister. The furniture seemed to have migrated to this locale, and she supposed he found the nearby sea old-fashioned, for there was also a swimming pool, a neat blue circle.

He perched on a beach chair. "Fancy a drink?" he said.

"I'll pass, thanks. Howard, it's not even lunchtime."

"Jet lag. I've been flying all over."

To the Arctic, she assumed. If he'd meant London, he'd have said so, or even if he meant the Continent. She said, "I thought you were meant to be running S.H.I.E.L.D."

"That too. That's what the telephone's for." He was unbuttoning his shirt cuffs, loosening his tie. He looked like a Jersey seashore tough. "Completely useless, of course; at least half of us are spies."

"Do you think so? I thought: incompetent, surely."

"Incompetent spies."

"Does the government know this?"

"Oh, the government's the same. State department, embassies— riddled with 'em. This guy, codename: Homer. His Communist buddies." He made a face she couldn't read, somewhere between disgust and exhaustion. "It was the same at Los Alamos."

They didn't talk about Los Alamos, was what she had understood.

"Well," she said. "It's not a new problem."

"Dugan, being Dugan, wants to bang some heads together."

"The direct approach. Which is why you hired him."

"Yes." He said abruptly, "Look, will you sit down? I can't stand being towered over. Take off your shoes. Help yourself; there's gin, tonic water..."

He himself was refilling his glass, plucking ice cubes from a silver bucket. Condensation dripped from it like tears into the grass. Peggy sat, but didn't drink. She asked, "Have you got a staff, Howard?"

"I like that you call me Howard."

"A butler, and so on?"

"You know what it shows? It shows that you're not afraid of me."

He glanced at her. His sunglasses obscured his eyes. She was afraid of him, but not in the way that he meant. It was possible to be afraid for other people, to be afraid on other people's behalf. It had happened in the war, plenty of times. War got rid of the fear for yourself: you thought you'd die, and then you didn't, and after that, you thought: I can do anything at all. But you became so afraid for other people. Of what you could do to them; of what others could do. They seemed so fragile; they grew fragiler as you grew stronger. You couldn't help but remember the red place where a head had split, the mass of flesh that had once been a mouth. You had thought, what might it be like to kiss that mouth? And then, now, no more mouth: just like that, in an instant.

She said, "Afraid? I don't think you could boil an egg without instructions."

"Now, Peggy, that's very cruel. That's offensive."

"I haven't decided yet if you can call me Peggy."

"All right; I won't, then. Peg." He grinned; she half-expected him to stick out his tongue. "As it so happens, I do employ a butler."

"I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear it."

"A countryman of yours. Keeps trying to feed me Marmite."

"What do we think: spy or not-spy?"

"Possibly an assassin. His omelettes are out of this world, though, so at least I'll die a happy man."

They sat in silence for a minute. His statement hung uncomfortably in the air. She was wondering: is the goal to die happy? Howard hadn't seemed happy, as such, during the war; looking back, she didn't think any of them had. But at the same time there'd been a kind of correctness, as when a tool is finally fitted to its task.

Howard sighed and fidgeted.

"Jesus, Carter," he said at last. "What the hell am I supposed to do? It's not like running a business."

"No. You should've thought of that before." She resisted the temptation to pat his arm. She felt she was being maneuvered into a position; she'd begun to sense it when she entered the house. It was not a position she was particularly fond of. "This will seem off topic, but: do you sometimes feel," she said, "that women are forever being looked to to tell men to grow up? I do. And I should damn well think that men can manage to grow up as I did, because they haven't any other option; and if they wish to blame someone for it, they can blame themselves." She paused. "I think I always rather liked that Steve had a machine to do it for him."

"It wasn't the machine."

"I know."

"It was the serum. We don't have the formula."

"That wasn't what I meant."

He removed his sunglasses. His eyes looked like they hurt in the light. She wondered how much sleep he managed to get. "That's not—" he said. "—That's not what I'm asking you to do. I'm not asking you to do that. I just need you to help me, help me start over."

She considered it briefly. "Yes, all right," she said.

She could see he was surprised that it had been so easy.

"Look, I've got nothing else to do," she said. "One has to do _something_ , and there's not a lot on offer."

Faintly unexpectedly, their eyes met. Despite being— well, _Howard_ , he understood her, it was clear, or at least understood what she meant.

"Where do we start, then?" she asked. "Shall I go down to Washington with you?"

"I thought I'd move the operation here."

"You haven't got a house to live in."

"I have a house," he protested. He gestured to the Spanish arches. They were picturesquely adorned with dark green ivy.

"You have a house, with apparently nothing in it."

"A very appropriate start to an exciting enterprise." He lifted his cocktail glass. "To the future! Come on, Peggy, grab a drink."

Of course he had champagne, the little bastard. No one ever said no to him; there was never a reason to not celebrate. She let him pop the cork and pour two flutes. It fizzed over, sticky on both their hands.

She had never understood the urge to toast the future, when you didn't know what was in it yet. It seemed to her to be terribly naive. She'd used to think people did it because they couldn't imagine how bad things could get, or couldn't imagine that something could be great and terrible, that you could do something tremendous and still mourn it; that there were so many permutations of loss, and of victory. But she knew, and Howard knew this. And here they were anyways, asking for more. What, she wondered, did this say about them?

"Oh, very well," she said. "To the future."

She drank. The champagne tasted like sunlight. The sun itself crawled up the terrace steps. It was warm at her neckline; the day would be hot. She felt burned, though it was early yet.

* * *

Howard's house, predictably, would take ten years to refurnish. He kept trying to make revisions to it— as his vision of the future altered, he explained. (He appeared to think the future was a mood or ambiance, something that he could construct around him.) The kitchen was full of appliances now, divided into areas called "cold zones" and "hot zones," which Peggy did not fully understand. The coffee maker was almost the size of a wall, and appeared to have a clock in it. Every surface seemed to be made of something synthetic. The chairs in the parlor were inflatable plastic. Peggy felt uncomfortable in the house, and she suspected that Howard did as well; when she visited, they were hardly ever in it. Instead, they sat out by the pool, sometimes well into autumn and winter.

By that time, "this guy, codename: Homer" had been caught, and several of his Communist friends. This did not seem to reassure anyone at all. If anything, it made them more suspicious. Peggy knew the little man, Angleton, who ran counterintelligence for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s cousin Cousins, over at the Company; they had worked together briefly in the war. She'd disliked him at first— he detested Howard— but he had an appealing seriousness. In many ways, he was Howard's antidote, or possibly a kind of penance available to Peggy: when she grew exasperated with Howard's helplessness, with his whims and his grandiosity, she went to Angleton. But he was very boring. It was spies, spies, spies all the time with him. He trusted no one, and had recently grown obsessed with shapeshifters. (Peggy regretted informing him of their existence.) He was convinced that the Soviets had networks everywhere. "And not just the Soviets," he said. "These Paperclip boys— they _seem_ very nice. You catch one of them out; people say: a rotten apple! A rotten apple, that's what they say, a bad egg. They say, So that's where the smell was coming from! And then they start holding their noses again."

"Ignore him," Howard said. "He's losing his marbles. We vetted everyone. I let you bring in a magician, even though I didn't like it. The guy from Tibet, the whatsisface Supreme." Howard had sneered the whole time. He didn't like magic. "I'm doing this out of respect for you," he'd said. "As for myself, I'll stick with technology."

Technology didn't make him feel safe. He had added a fallout shelter to the house, a sort of house-under-the-house. It was a modern wonder. There was modular furniture, a record player, racks of tinned food. He'd designed the filtration system himself. The lighting was homier than in the mansion, a sort of low gold color, to conserve electricity. Peggy thought that he slept down there sometimes. It was very quiet, a— well, an end-of-the-world quiet. She could see how he would find it comforting, the sound of no one left to be in danger. It had happened already, the very worst thing, and now, at last, there was nothing to be done. He could be alone. He could listen to records. He could browse the library; he could read.

* * *

She had long since started seeing Gabe by then. Gabe Jones, one of Steve's commandos. She hadn't really known him during the war. Steve had brought them together again: Gabe, as it turned out, was writing a book. He had a contract to publish his memoir. "Plus," he said on the phone, "I teach history now. It kind of makes me want to make sure, you know, that all those future historians don't get things wrong."

To her everlasting shame, the first time she saw him— waiting for her by a Midtown bistro in the rain— she broke down and wept. "I'm sorry," she said, as he touched her shoulder— his face concerned, as though she might somehow be injured. "I'm sorry; it's not— I'm just—" For an instant, there in that moment, she was back: the peculiar scent of their underground bunker, metallic and faintly aquarian; the machine-noise of Morse code and typewriter keys; girl clerks laughing in the file stacks, their gossipy hum. God, how she'd missed it— and so much of it dead now, or lost, or packed away, or simply gone, in the way that the war had been gone without warning. "I'm so sorry," she said again.

But Gabe, as it turned out, didn't mind or couldn't mind. At heart, he was a placid soul, Gabe. She'd always assumed him to be a secret firebrand. People often made this mistake, he confessed to her. In fact, he was one of those solid sort of people who plant themselves immovably wherever they stand, and simply refuse to be moved from that place. It was a quality that she cherished in him. One of a number, as time went on. He read a great deal, which she'd never had time for. He had an answer for every question she asked: Why wasn't New York a capital city? Why did the English language lack a second-person plural? Why did she always, no matter how many times she played it, seem to lose at speed chess?

"You like to know all the possible outcomes," he told her. "That's how you make decisions. But it isn't about that. It's a different game."

"I know it's a different game," she said.

* * *

"He's not good enough for you, you know," Stark told her.

"Oh, go to hell, Howard," Peggy said. She was packing up her briefcase. It was eleven at night, and he was drunk, and this was a conversation they'd had.

"He'll want children at some point; are you going to go and have children?"

"I'm too old."

"There are machines for that."

"I'm sure there are. I'm sure you have machines for everything. Just everything. I'm sure you'd grow a baby in a vat, if you could. No other person needed; one hundred percent Stark. A patented product. You can raise him underground, in your little bunker, so he'll never be irradiated— "

"Goddammit, Peg!" He hurled a pen against the wall. It was such a minimal act of violence; she had to laugh. _I've killed men; has Howard ever even killed someone?_ she thought, and then she felt quite nauseated, and pressed her hand to her lips.

"You don't care," she said, "whether or not I have children. You've never even bothered to ask. If I wanted them, if that was something I wanted. But you care very much about me being unfaithful."

"To me?" He laughed at her.

"No, to _him!_ " So there it was, at least, out on the table. "But not really to him, just to your spectacular creation, so I suppose it's really about you in the end. Which is predictable, Howard, really predictable; it's always, always about you in the end, isn't it?"

"You don't know what you're talking about. Steve was my friend, and he's out there, somewhere—"

"Steve is a fiction that you use to justify your work. You talk about him like he's Christ and I'm married to him. Do you think he'd forgive you, if he showed back up?"

She saw him start to mouth the words _Forgive me for what_ and realize that he couldn't say them.

For a moment she really wasn't sure what he would do. She wished that she could take the question back. She knew the answer, and it was hard to look at his face, to see that answer written on it. "Howard," she said, and wasn't sure how to continue.

He said, "Leave."

"You can't throw me out."

An ugly laugh. "Sure I can."

Her rage returned. "It's not _your_ office. It's not _your_ organization."

"It's my money, sweetheart. News flash: I own all of it."

"Fuck you," she said. She slammed her briefcase closed. "Then good luck keeping the world safe from your poolside. And by the way, you stink of gin."

She left the room. She heard his fist hit the wall. She didn't turn, because that was what he wanted: her minor, her second-rate, Marian forgiveness.

* * *

Phillips called the next morning, of course. No, he didn't know what Stark had said, only that there'd been a misunderstanding; Stark was moving to Washington; would assume management of a new office there; the New York office was Peggy's to run; and congratulations, incidentally, on her engagement; and could she and Stark quit being squabbling toddlers, and Stark being Stark, she would probably have to be the better man. Woman. Officer. Person.

"Thank you, sir," Peggy said.

When she went back to work on Monday morning, she could see the indentation, to the left of her desk, where Stark had punched the wall— she thought more than once. He had drawn blood; there was a streak on the paint. Another wound on his hand, another mark of regret. She thought of his still unfinished house in Cove Neck. She was surprised by the sense of betrayal she felt, by how badly she wished he hadn't gone away.

* * *

She married Gabe in a New York registrar's office, with Morita and Dugan for witnesses. The registrar, a kindly middle-aged woman, beamed at them— which made a change. She seemed distressed that Peggy had no female companions. "Still, I suppose you can do for yourself. You seem like the type," she said.

Peggy felt a brief pang. It was true that, since the SSR, she'd been almost wholly surrounded by men. She found it difficult to talk to other women. Her work was classified, and required long hours. She was in a foreign country, far from her family and war chums, and she had never found it particularly easy to make friends. And now, anyway, there was this constant fear: can I trust you? What do I really know about you? She had liked Melinda Maclean, a diplomat's wife who threw expatriate parties for half the Brits in Washington. Melinda was often in New York; she had family there. But— there you go— her husband had been codename: Homer. They had fled to Moscow almost two years back.

Gabe's sister Lizzy was quite pleasant to her. "And at least she's not a spy," Peggy said.

Gabe laughed. "You never know. She's the family radical."

"I don't mind her picket lines; I only care that she doesn't run off to Russia."

"Well, I can promise you she won't do that. She hates the cold."

Gabe himself would never run off. Peggy liked to remind herself of this. Each day, as she left for work, she felt a vague apprehension— shouldn't she stay? What if something happened? What if she closed the door behind her, the door of their little brownstone, and she was never ever able to get back in? She imagined whole streets of New York vanishing. It wasn't too fantastic. She had seen the tools that could bring it about. She was likely to be targeted. And she didn't think she could stand it if she lost Gabe now. He had become a kind of embodiment of a world she once had not dared to hope for, a hope that— superstitiously— she still refused to acknowledge.

At the end of the war, she'd been sent to Milan. Hydra had spread to Italy, and she was searching old manor houses for stolen treasure. It had been a bad time for her personally. Perhaps they'd all grown a little savage, after Steve's death. There was an absence where their heart should be; the body kept on twitching, but with no control. It was autonomic, not a human behavior. She'd seen a soldier— not, thank God, one of the commandos— keeping a necklace of Hydra teeth.

And then this palazzo, out in the country, not far from where the Po River bent. Somehow it had escaped being bombed, escaped, later, being ransacked. Walking through it, Peggy was conscious of her footsteps; conscious of the painted angels overhead. Their wings seemed to flicker in the unlit halls. Someone had once stood there, a human being, painting the little feathers on them. Centuries ago. Perhaps boys had posed for the cherubs, boys laughing and squabbling, now long dead. Their faces remained, despite war upon war. When she thought, it seemed really an accident that anything at all had survived destruction. Here or elsewhere; London, Dresden. A crime scene trace, evidence of murder. A mistake that soldiers would be sent to correct.

And yet these angels, almost weightless, ignorant of slaughter. As she stood there, the wind shifted, and through the open window, a wave of sunlight came pouring in, smelling of rosemary, stone, and cedar. Summer was close, and the earth didn't care who all had been buried in it. It kept producing, flower on flower. The banks of the Po were blooming again, where partisans had been shot, some younger than Peggy. A great sense of unreality seized her. _Am I alive?_ she wondered. _Have I really survived?_ The angels' gilt haloes flared in the sun, the whole world answering _yes, yes, yes!_ She knew it was random, and yet she was grateful, and she felt a kind of goodness all through her whole body and all through that world, a skeletal structure of mercy and love, a perennial life that was growing back.

She never shared this experience with Gabe, yet she often thought of it when she looked at him. She was a realist; she didn't think that life always went on. At the same time, there was this promise.

* * *

Howard himself married in 1963. Peggy didn't know his wife-to-be well: an Italian heiress, a dark-eyed beauty.

They had settled into a truce by then, she and Howard. It involved becoming strangers, who had no reason to comment on each other's marriages, each other's faults. They communicated via telephone most of the time. Once she had gone to a party at his refurnished house; he had been very polite, very formal to her. Her face had felt frozen. She thought she looked as though she were in pain, but no one seemed to notice.

Peggy and Gabe— _Ms. Carter and Sgt. Jones_ , read the invitation; "Typical," Peggy judged, ripping it in half— were invited to the wedding. They went because they liked a grand adventure, and it seemed the sort of thing to guarantee one. Besides, they were both intensely curious: what would the wedding be like; what would the marriage be like? Peggy said, "Perhaps it's a business arrangement."

"You're an extraordinarily cynical woman," Gabe told her.

"Oh, well, I do my best."

The wedding was Catholic; the party was not. Peggy thought she had never seem so much liquor in one place. Everyone was there: Dugan lighting friendship pagodas on the lawn, Morita cackling, still his sidekick; Arnim Zola lurking on the terrace. Even Angleton and his wife briefly appeared. Angleton wanted to talk about Philby, Kim Philby, a former operative who'd been friends with codename: Homer, and who now appeared to have defected after years of scrutiny. To Angleton this all smacked of Deeper Agents. Deeper Agents were Angleton's specter, what kept him up at night: the agents below the agents, the agents-in-waiting.

"I don't know," Peggy said. "I remember Philby. He threw up in my freesias once. He didn't really strike me as the spider type."

"Spider?" Angleton appeared confused.

"Yes, with, you know, a web of conspiracy. He was chiefly interested in brandy, as I recall."

Angleton furrowed his brow. "Who is Brandy? Is he English? Did he also work for Six?"

Peggy really thought that she might have to laugh; there was something about Angleton that inexcusably provoked it. He was like a spider himself, all eyes and legs. Before she could, she was saved by the appearance of Howard. Well, "appearance:" he staggered into her and draped his arms around her shoulders. He seemed exhilarated, and his breath could have ignited flames.

"Agent Peggy!" he said. "And James Jesus Angleton. The man with the best name in the business. I'm going to steal her away, James Jesus Angleton. Agent Peggy, have you met Maria?"

"I have," Peggy said, trying to move his arms away. Angleton had deserted her, the cowardly bastard. "She seems lovely."

It was true. Maria was lovely. She seemed faintly unknowable— a curious quality, as though she'd in some way already surrendered to Howard, had let him take some part of her and bury it away. Peggy imagined it locked up with his other treasures, perhaps in his bunker, safeguarded against the atomic age; under the ground: where no one could see it.

"She is," Howard confided. "She's lovely, she's very, very lovely. You should come to my bunker."

"Now? Howard, is that a euphemism?"

"You didn't invite me to your wedding," Howard said.

"No. Mine was rather smaller than yours."

"And you didn't get pregnant. Good. That's good."

She resisted the urge to punch him in the face. "Your approval is noted. What do you want?"

"I want..." He listed to one side. She propped him up with her shoulder. "I just, I wonder, why the fuck would you bring a kid into this world? Why the fuck would you bring a kid into this? _You_ , you can come to my bunker when the Russkies nuke us, but a kid? A kid? A kid?"

His voice was hoarse. She said, "Howard, you're drunk."

"I know. I remember. I know what I am. I stink of gin. And you're still not afraid of me."

Actually, at the moment, he smelled of champagne. She remembered that same light lemony scent, in this exact location, so many years before. The optimism of it. "No," she said. "I've never been afraid. Not of you. Not like that."

She helped him to sit on the wet grass of the terrace. The band, behind them, was playing a slow jazz standard. White tablecloths were rippling in the wind. Dugan had given up on the pagodas. He was chasing Morita across the lawn now, a bouquet of sparklers in each hand. They alarmed a duck, which rose quacking from the darkness. Peggy smiled, then caught Zola also watching. That killed the smile on her face. He was like a scientist, observing her contentment. As though it were a phenomenon that he needed to contain.

She said to Howard, "I know that you've never wanted to hurt people. And that matters quite a lot, I think."

"Are you and Jones happy? You should be happy."

"Yes. We are. The politics are difficult. Sometimes we think of moving to France. We've heard it's easier there, for mixed couples."

"You can't do that. I need you here, Peggy."

She rolled her eyes a little at that. "You've barely spoken to me for years."

"I need you. I want to do one good thing in my life. I want to do it right. I want to see it through."

"—But you did," she said. "You already did."

The sudden rush of emotion was so unexpected that she had to catch her breath. It closed her throat. She'd thought those feelings gone, all the grief, all the tenderness. Howard, too, made a sound as though she had struck him. He reached out reflexively to clasp her hand.

"Stay with me," he said. "Peg, stay with me."

"Till death do us part?" she asked. She had meant the question to be light-hearted, but it wasn't. She sighed. His head was resting on her shoulder. "Oh, very well, then. All of us together in the bunker. God! Just think of _that_. You'll need more space. Or let's not get blown up."

"I'll do what I can," Howard said.

Above, in the sky, real fireworks went off, not the small ones that Dugan had played with. Great bursts of white and gold and silver. The perfect Stark accompaniment: playful bombs, a weapon turned toy. She felt all at once protective of Howard, which was, obviously, ludicrous. There were few more dangerous people in the world. Yet here he was, half-asleep on her shoulder, so full of goodwill and so confused by it, while out there in the dark, beyond the blooming white candles... She was reminded of a poem she had learnt in school. Later she would look it up, at home, in one of Gabe's dog-eared poetry books; a poem about the war, she had thought, but which war? It wasn't clear, even from the book.

_Ah, love, let us be true_  
 _To one another! for the world, which seems_  
 _To lie before us like a land of dreams,_  
 _So various, so beautiful, so new,_  
 _Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,_  
 _Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;_  
 _And we are here as on a darkling plain_  
 _Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,_  
 _Where ignorant armies clash by night._

* * *

**EPILOGUE**

Stark's child was born in springtime, so: doubly symbolic. New life bursting forth everywhere it could. Peggy envied new life's energetic power. She herself was getting old, she knew; but beyond that, she felt drained and exhausted by the moment. She saw it in Gabe; she saw it in Howard; she saw it in Maria, too, when she visited that uncomfortable house. They had put all their strength towards one act of labor; now their labor was over, and they didn't know what to do. The child itself was not what they'd expected. It caused them unease and demanded their attention, and maybe a little bit, secretly, they mourned the loss of the child that they'd wanted— a simpler, better, more beautiful child.

Howard, of course, was making lots of money. Raking it in, post-Tet Offensive. S.H.I.E.L.D. was expanding. Peggy had never considered it from this angle, but the worse things got, the more successful they became. There were new agents now who seemed to understand this pattern. They didn't understand when their leaders complained that the goal had once been something altogether different. When, Peggy thought, when had it changed? In '68, perhaps, with the assassinations? But then, that line of action was already in place, from '63, from '65... And she remembered, vividly remembered, sitting in Howard's living room, crying on Gabe's shoulder as Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. That was 1969, and she had felt such hope, an unbearable hope, like a physical pressure. She hadn't been able to explain her crying. But later, standing in the kitchen with Gabe, she'd said, "I just thought that— we really are good, or— we can be good, we have such a capacity for goodness. For wonder, I suppose."

Then she'd chided herself, because: _we really are good_ , when Gabe of all people had reason to distrust that. He had put so much faith in the Civil Rights Movement, and these past years had not been easy years; they had not been what he— they— had hoped for. But when she looked up at him, he had also been crying. And there in that kitchen, half-drunk on Howard's cocktails, she had understood why she, at least, was crying: she was crying because she did believe people were good, because they could have been good and they chose not to be; because it wasn't as simple as being good. A long time ago, they had wanted to believe that— that it was that simple. Now they were old, and they couldn't go back; they couldn't see their way back, because they knew too much.

Peggy held the child that Howard had not wanted. She remembered Howard's voice breaking on the night of his wedding: _Why the fuck would you bring a kid into this?_ But there it was, a little moon-eyed creature that had no kind of sin on it. _It's not too late for you,_ she wanted to whisper to the baby. He had buried nothing out in the desert. He hadn't been down to the bunker yet. He didn't know about radiation, which you couldn't see or hear or taste; he didn't know about Angleton's Deeper Agents. What if Angleton himself was a Deeper Agent? she thought. What if they all were? What if that was the secret, the key to it all— what if the evil could be under your own skin? You thought you were making your own decisions. You thought you were doing the best that you could. But all along, it had always been futile.

The thought unsettled her. She held the baby more tightly. She wanted to protect him from it. She wanted to save him from the memories that hurt her: from Howard, unable to voice his own guilt; from the scar on Howard's palm, like a memento of death; from the red mouths of war; from the string of Hydra teeth. From everything that was his inheritance.

If only, she thought, he could know that he was loved. Not because of who he was, but because of who he wasn't yet: because he was the future she had toasted long ago, the future that always receded from them. They thought they had failed, but life resurged, and all the regretted dead of the past came forwards once more, in new forms on the earth. Something survived, from life to life. If it wasn't love, then at least it was a promise, a promise that nothing would be forgotten.

She could hear Howard's voice now, calling her name from his chair on the terrace. She lifted the baby up to her hip, with a threatening look as he started to fuss. "None of that," she said. "You're going to have to do better." He seemed unimpressed by this admonition. He pushed his head against her shoulder, and she cradled it gently, blinking as she stepped out into the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a ficlet for [morgan-leigh](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com), and belongs to the Sad S.H.I.E.L.D. Founders Fandom Society.
> 
> The poem that Peggy looks up is Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
> 
> "In the other world we shall reap as we sow now" is from a Matthew Henry commentary on Galatians.
> 
> James Jesus Angleton, Donald and Melinda Maclean, and Kim Philby were all real people, whom I have shamelessly fictionalized here.
> 
> You can come talk to me about it on [tumblr](http://septembriseur.tumblr.com).


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